Its been a bad week for me. I moved to Media Temple hosting 4 days back, yesterday night I moved again to BlueHost. In my hurry I was unable to backup my previous post I apologize to everyone for the lost comments. My Site has been horribly slow and constantly down for 2 full days and the average response time for the site was more than 8 secs (ideally it shouldn’t cross 1sec). While the initial experience with MT was good i.e. buying and setting things up. The support later turned out to be very slow and poor MT doesn’t have a 24X7 support since I am an international customer they took more than 24 hours to reply to any of my questions. BlueHost was a refreshing change I clicked on the Live Chat button on the main page and was immediately connected with a sales person who clarified some of my doubts later I again used Live Chat to get help configuring the MX records since I use Google Apps to maintain my Email. I like to keep track of my site uptime and response time and I use multiple Site monitoring services like Site24X7, mon.itor.us and Pingdom. I highly recommend Pingdom to anyone who is serious about maintaining and monitoring their sites. Pingdom played a huge role in my moving from dreamhost and MT to bluehost. I can already see a huge differences in the response time (its all below 1 sec) and page load and my Pingdom data also confirms this. (Since My DNS is still propagating it still seems a bit slow in Britain and Europe)
Overall MT has been a bad experience for me. For the high cost of hosting it is not worth it. Though they themselves admitted that they were overwhelmed with support questions and hence replies were being delayed. But what I cant understand is why they can’t have a 24X7 support like dreamhost or live chat support like bluehost and the ability to mark support questions as High, Critical, medium etc.The only positive part was they were very professional in handling the issues and immediately refunded my money back.
The most funny or should I say stupid thing that I did was that I had done my research for the past 3 months (using data collected from site24×7 mon.itor.us) and found that bluehost had better uptime and (more important) response time for the sites they hosted over MT. In fact I even commented on this on paul stamatiou’s blog 2 months back and wanted to do a blog post about it but never got down to doing it.
Hey paul I been monitoring your site (MT)and a few others (bluehost, dreamhost etc) using moitor.us and various other tools. I found your response time(MT Grid) a bit slow. I eliminated sites hosted on dedicated accounts. I found that people hosted on bluehost seemed to have much better response time. I will do a write up shortly when I get back home from office. what are your thoughts on this?
So why did I still go for MT ? Well to be frank I am got sucker into the Grid hosting marketing, everyone seemed to be telling how good they were and able to handle the DIGG effect etc. (heck dreamhost handled the DIGG effect for me without a glitch) I now realised that MT grid server is nothing but a marketing bluff.
Just as a slight correction, I am not on the (mt) grid; I have a dedicated solution. As for (mt) 24 hour support, their homepage says “(877) 578-4000 24/7 Support”.